Using Quick Notes Linked To Safari Web Pages

When you create Quick Note in Safari in macOS Monterey it should maintain a link to that web page and allow you to return to that note the next time you visit that page. This could be useful, but the feature is a bit buggy.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Quick Notes with Safari.
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So Quick Notes are a great new feature of macOS Monterey that allow you to quickly create some notes. But a special side feature of that is that these quick notes can easily be tied to webpages in Safari. So every time you return to the same webpage in Safari the same quick note can be brought up. This allows you to take notes for a particular webpage. Let's look at an example. I'm at Goggle Trends page here in Safari. This could be some sort of statistics page for your website or your business or a page where there's data published and you're doing research on it. Now the idea is that every time I return to this page the same quick note will appear at the bottom right hand corner so you could easily access the note associated with this webpage. That sounds great but the implementation is far from perfect. I find that this works sometimes. In particularly when you're creating a new one it doesn't seem to work right away and takes awhile for it to consistently appear in the bottom right hand corner.
I find the best way to create one of these is to click on the Actions button right here and then select Add to Quick Note. You could do a variety of other things. For instance you could have a hot corner set to create a new Quick Note when you go down to the bottom right corner or you could use the keyboard shortcut fn or the globe key and  Q to create a Quick Note. But I'm going to use this Add to Quick Note here. This will create a new Quick Note in Notes and you could see I didn't have one before and now it says I have 1 Quick Note and it adds the link to this note. So, this is very important, the link must be in the Quick Note for this to work. 
So I'm going to actually type some text here and say, Goggle Trends note. So it has kind of a title. There I'll add a note like that. Now I'm going to close this Quick Note, in fact I'm going to quit Notes completely. I'm going to return here to this page. Now nothing is going to happen right away because we've been at this page for awhile. But let's go somewhere else. Then let's return to that page. Now what should happen is at the bottom right hand corner you should see an indicator for this Quick Note. But it's not going to appear. Let's try Refreshing. Let's try Quitting Safari and going in again. It's going to return us to this page and aha there it is. If I click on it it will bring up Notes with that Quick Note being shown. Now I can add something else which is nice. There you go. So another note to that. Let's quit Notes here. Now you can see it's kind of consistently appearing. 
So here's another example. Here's the Wikipedia top 25 report. Say this is some other data that you're trying to track. It's always going to be at the same exact URL. So if we add a new Quick Note then I can add some notes to this here and theoretically I will get one of these two Quick Notes depending upon which of these two pages I'm at. So again it's kind of tricky to bring up especially the first time. I'll Refresh here and nothing happened. I'll Quit Safari and start it up again and there, this time it appears and now I can select it and it goes to this. Sometimes, kind of annoyingly, it appears like this and that's great because you can actually see what's there and you click on it to bring it up again. Now we can still see it there at the bottom right hand corner. If you wait long enough it will go away. So it's kind of appears when you first go to the page.
Let's go, in out history here, back to Goggle Trends and then, sure enough, there's this one for the Goggle Trends page. So now I've got these two Quick Notes. Both associated with a different webpage. Both will come up easily at the bottom right hand corner when I'm viewing that webpage. In addition to that, in Quick Notes I could see these here and I could easily bring it up, double click there to go to that page. So I can kind of access it from both directions. So I could start in Notes and access the page or I could start with the page and access the note. 
Now unfortunately this works per page, not per site. For instance if you wanted to have notes associated with a website it won't work. It doesn't come up here on this main page or any page that I go to on this site. It only appears if I actually go to that particular page and then you'll see it appear. That's why I think it's probably not as useful as a research tool where you might be going to a site and digging down into the articles to do research. And more as a notes for you tool on particular pages that you visit from time to time, like pages with statistics and information.
Another way that you could start a Quick Note, by the way, is to select some text in the webpage and then Control Click, two finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse, and select Add To Quick Note. But unfortunately that doesn't add to the Quick Note associated with this page. But you can select it, Cut it or Copy it, and then go to that Quick Note and Paste it in there if you want. It seems like it should work better than that. Also when this goes away here, in the bottom right hand corner like it's going to right now, it's really hard to get it back. You could Refresh the page. I found one of the ways to get it back is to simply switch to a different app. Let me switch to the Finder here. I don't have any Finder windows open. Then switch back to Safari. Then it will return. 
So I would like to see this work more consistently. Maybe in the future it will work a little bit better allowing you to add selected text to the note, allowing you to easily access the note with a keyboard shortcut, and things like that. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Using Quick Notes Linked To Safari Web Pages”

Razvan Mihai

3 years ago

Fn-Q is a time-saver, albeit this is just an automation of the steps: Open Notes App, Open New Note in a particular Folder (e.g., Quick Notes), Float Note on Top, Close Main Notes App.

Is there any keyboard shortcut for "Add a link," or would it be possible to create one? I looked into the Help menu, but the "Add Link..." under Edit seems to be doing something different.

Gary Rosenzweig

Razvan: I don't see one. You may want to suggest that to Apple.

Fran

I don't see any action button at the end of the address bar in Safari. I am using Monterey12.0.1

Fran: In Safari, Preferences, Tabs, switch to Compact Tabs. Or, just use the keyboard shortcut or bottom right corner.

Joel Anderson

I see that it misbehaves a bit in Safari. My bigger disappointment is trying to use it to attach notes to any particular email.

Comments Closed.

Using Quick Notes Linked To Safari Web Pages

Comments: 5 Responses to “Using Quick Notes Linked To Safari Web Pages”

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